Review: The Book of Boba Fett – In the Name of Honor s01e07

The first thing you think of when you get to the end of episode seven of The Book of Boba Fett is, how is this supposedly the finale? This episode: ‘In the Name of Honor’, in theory brings all the other plotlines together and gives it some kind of climax.  *Warning! Spoilers Ahead!*

After a couple of episodes where the series has branched off into following more interesting characters and pretty much abandoning Boba Fett (Temuera Morrison) entirely, we get back to the run of the mill Boba story which yet again fails to live up to anything particularly interesting. The long-awaited confrontation with the Pykes finally occurs, but their strategy doesn’t seem to make much sense as per usual.

As is the Star Wars way the supposed bad guys are completely unable to shoot anything and their obvious numerical advantage is completely and utterly pointless. That they then employ Scorpenek droids means they should easily win this battle and our rag tag group of heroes should be lying dead in the street. It’s still not entirely clear why no one in the Book of Boba Fett uses artillery in a meaningful way either and why the Pykes resort to a sneaky bomb, followed by ground troops.  Different tactics would make quick work of Boba, The Mandalorian and a bunch of desert villagers, who in no way pose a serious threat to a large force.

In the midst of all this we have Grogu appearing in an X-Wing with R2, following the standard trope for Star Wars of a potential Jedi leaving their training early. It’s annoying, but inevitable I guess, that rather than do something interesting they have chosen to bring Grogu back in for only a tiny pay off. if The Book of Boba Fett is so desperate to be interesting that it has to resort to yet again pulling in a character from a different series, there is a serious problem underpinning the show and it’s unclear how it can possibly survive a second season.

One of the key issues all season has been that in terms of the narrative and the character development there hasn’t been enough work put in to make us care or to understand any of the characters choices.  Boba Fett himself is too much of a blank slate, with no real information or suggestion of why he has made the decisions he has. We still don’t understand fully why he has chosen to stop being a mercenary and become the ‘saviour’ of Tatooine. There are vague inferences made, but not any true signs of character growth which indicate a change within him.  To a degree he is still a bit of a cardboard villain, and the series would be much more interesting if it followed Cob Vanth (Timothy Olyphant) or Fennec Shand (Ming Na Wen) who actually have an ounce of substance about them.

While Robert Rodriguez has brought some interesting touches to the show, the whole premise of the series has undermined any efforts to make this a success. At the end of these seven episodes, we are essentially left not really knowing much more about Boba Fett than at the beginning and all the highlights come from outside the core characters.  Then there’s the fact that the new characters that were introduced have not been developed and opportunities have been missed.  if this is going to succeed there needs to be serious changes.

Where to watch The Book of Boba Fett